The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Today, routers, gateways, and other types of communication devices are used in a variety of applications to process multiple streams of data and service multiple connections. To direct data packets in these streams to proper destinations (such as queues or ports), communication devices often apply multiple parsing rules to packet headers. However, parsing operations generally are resource- and time-intensive. As a result, parsing often introduces significant latency to data streams.